To the test of the Spending Review (spend better to spend less) Italy reacted as usual: the unions rise up and the parties point out. Yet the spending review is only the first step of the path that the country will inevitably have to take if it wants to start growing again: that is, the path of a profound restructuring of the PA and the State.
This is a path that other countries such as the USA and Great Britain, for example, have already followed successfully several years ago and which has given positive results that none of the parties then in opposition (Democrats and Labor) dreamed of calling into question once we return to government. In Italy, unfortunately for us, this did not happen. The conservative forces of the right and left prevailed (the social state cannot be touched! Article 18 cannot be touched! the Constitution cannot be touched! etc.) and the result is what we have in front of us: a stellar public debt, productivity in free fall and a negative GDP.
Now, as Monti said, the country must react even if it will take years to reverse course and one legislature may not be enough. Precisely for this reason, the message that the government sends to public employees is very important. There are certainly too many civil servants and they must be reduced, but they are not necessarily lazy or incompetent. When the iron and steel and chemical industries had to be restructured in the early 90s, no one took the liberty of saying that the iron and steel and chemical workers were slackers and that they were responsible for the crisis. That crisis was dealt with by privatizing public enterprises, stimulating innovation and productivity, and restructuring companies, many of which had to be closed. The redundancies (many) were managed with the tools (few) available at the time but there was no Stella or Rizzo who pilloried those workers.
The same must be true today for civil servants. Restructuring the PA means eliminating duplication, closing useless institutions or offices, establishing productivity parameters that apply in Milan as in Palermo. Unfortunately, it also means creating redundancies or, if we want to be more precise, exposing the pockets of "disguised unemployment" that the PA has helped to hide in recent years, especially in the South. This is why it is essential to introduce new parameters right now in the evaluation of civil servants and to experiment with new work organization models. Professionalism and responsibility should be stimulated and rewarded and the independent ability to organize work by objectives rather than by procedures should be encouraged wherever possible. In short, what the country needs is a new paradigm of public employment and this is an objective that is within our reach, if only we knew how to use this crisis to thoroughly renew our Public Administration.
Of course, this poses the problem of redundancies and the success or otherwise of this operation will depend on the way we manage it. Many years ago it was thought to renew the PA by opening the doors wide to young with a spectacular early retirement maneuver (the baby pensioners). The operation, of course, failed and we are still paying the bill. Repeating it today would be impossible. What we can do instead is to make available to these workers all the re-employment tools we have and also to experiment with new ones. There is not only mobility within the PA (which can work if absurd constraints are eliminated such as the distance in kilometers between the old and the new job or the absolute equivalence of level and contents of the new job, etc.) or mobility towards retirement (2 or 3 years). There is also outplacement towards private activities and there is the possibility of encouraging self-employment for those who think they can start their own business.
Finally, there is also an area of potential development of new service activities in which many workers from the public sector or young people looking for a first job could find employment, even if only partial or temporary. It is the case of tourism, of the Cultural heritage and museums, ofassistance to people and other sectors as well. These are sectors that require services that could be provided by cooperative societies, specialized private agencies or even joint ventures. It is about checking all the possibilities, exploring all fields and never ceasing to look for job opportunities. The essential thing is that a mass of inactive civil servants awaiting retirement is not created who, together with exodus from industry, could one day constitute a social problem that is very difficult for anyone to manage.
